Busybox, nandroid, strange stuff

I have been experimenting with my new droid/milestone the past couple of days, odd problems which I am past now but still curious about.

Firstly after flashing the 2.1 sbf with rsd it will autoboot and screen slider will be there, then when I reboot, screen slider will be missing. This only happend when I flashed an sbf from the sbf site(2.1 uk version, not service), doing a factory reset didn't have any problem -could reboot as many times and slider would be there.... then suddenly after factory boot it would dissapear after first boot. Anyway solved this problem by installing screen mode widget after first boot after flash, solved problem, but still weird. Fixed this now but still curious about it.

Next, nandroid backup is missing from recovery menu, I have rooted and can execute root commands after typing "su" via Android Terminal emulator, so pretty sure is rooted. So why no nandroid? I thought I could do nandroid backup after rooting.

Next busybox won't install, tried the app, did the "searching system" for over an hour(not exagerrating), eventually gave up and uninstalled.

Can't execute commands via usb/adb in recovery mode as the other guy suggested so been trying these commands both with terminal emulator on phone, and usb-debugging mode with windows shell. Using these I can go "su" and type "ls" to see files on my droid phone....but when I try to "mount /system" or /sdcard from windows I just get a print about mount options, when I try to "cat /sdcard/busybox > /system/xbin/busybox" I get a "file is read only" error.

I would like advice on how to install busybox, I would like to do it manually(because the app seems to not work for me, remember I waited over an hour while it "searched") and I want to learn to manually do stuff anyway. I tried to chmod /system/xbin too, but that didn't seem to change it from read only.

Also any thoughts on why nandroid backup is missing from my recovery menu even though my droid is rooted.

I am still learning and researching, and appreciate any links or tips.